LAUNCHING ‘THE BLOKE’ ON DVD Speech given by Graham Shirley, 12 May 2009

Within walking distance of the Powerhouse Museum are the old Walsh Bay Wharves – places like Pier One, now a hotel and function centre, and the Wharf Theatre. Over the road nestles the up-market Theatre Company. Walsh Bay, like Pyrmont, is now associated increasingly with prestige businesses and up-market living.

Back in the 1950s it was a set of rough-and-tumble wharves, a place of heavy, backbreaking manual labour of men who used cranes, nets, grappling hooks and their bent backs to unload crates, sacks, 44-gallon drums and wheat whose dust could trigger silicosis. In the 1950s there was no Australian feature industry to speak of, and yet we produced many documentaries. Among the documentary filmmakers were Keith Gow, Norma Disher and Jock Levy of the Waterside Workers’ Film Unit. From the start to the finish of the decade, the ‘wharfies’ film unit’ made a dozen remarkable, semi-dramatised documentaries that recorded the working and pay conditions of wharfies, the building workers, coal-miners and other unionists they knew.

One day, Gow, Disher and Levy met a man in his 80s very different to the usual people on the wharves. Tall and with a resonant theatrical voice, this man was impeccably dressed, complete with a three-piece brown suit with a matching homburg, overcoat and amber-handled umbrella. This man was working as a watchman, sometimes during the day, sometimes at night. As he roamed the wharves by night, he used his torch to scare rats out of a burst sack of grain, or hurry along a drunk who’d just hurled a brick through a window. This watchman’s name was .

Keith Gow knew who Raymond Longford was, and was aware that he’d been an Australian feature filmmaker 50 years before. He tried to draw Longford into talking about his early days of filmmaking, including that Longford and 2 his partner had made near other wharves two harbour inlets to the east – in the working-class suburb of Woolloomooloo. But that day Longford just didn’t want to talk about the past. Because by the 1950s, Lottie Lyell and Arthur Tauchert, two of the people who had contributed most to The Sentimental Bloke had been dead for a quarter of a century, and Lottie Lyell had meant an enormous amount to Longford – enough to make him cry as he talked about her to Lacey Percival, a veteran cameraman who also bumped into him on the wharves in the ‘50s.

There was also one night in 1955 when the Sydney Film Festival ran a print of the recently rediscovered The Sentimental Bloke at the University of Sydney, no more than five kilometres from the Walsh Bay wharves. The audience lapped up the film and hailed it as an Australian classic and major rediscovery. But there was something or someone missing, and that someone was Raymond Longford. The night that SFF unspooled his film for the first time in 30 years, Longford may well, as usual, have been doing his lonely rounds on the wharves. When a Sunday Telegraph reporter contacted Longford and the festival after the screening, Longford said he hadn’t known about the screening, and the festival chairman said that the festival organisers hadn’t known Longford was still alive.

Raymond Longford now had four years of rediscovery and acclaim before his death in 1959. But from the time of his filmmaking partner Lottie Lyell’s death from tuberculosis in 1925 through to 1955, Longford had been very much a man in the shadows, unable to sustain the creative spark that his work with Lyell had generated. He was unable to adapt from silent to sound filmmaking, and he had his final film work as a bit player or extra in other people’s films in the 1930s.

In the 1950s, The Sentimental Bloke was lucky to survive at all. Not only had 90 per cent of ’s silent film output been lost through neglect or deliberate destruction, but there were a couple of nitrate film vault fires in – vaults run by the old federal government Cinema Branch who at that time were responsible for keeping films for the nucleus of a national film archive. In 1952, out of the second major Cinema Branch fire 3 in a decade, rare survivors were a set of cans containing a tinted nitrate 35mm print of The Sentimental Bloke . The National Library, who by the 1950s were running what did ultimately become the National Film and Sound Archive, arranged for the Bloke to be sent to Automatic Film Laboratories at Moore Park, Sydney. As part of preparing the film to be copied, this nitrate print needed to be respliced. The 15-year-old who did the resplicing was called Anthony, or Tony, Buckley.

The National Library at that time had a policy of not preserving films in their original 35 millimetre gauge, but reduction copying them to 16 millimetre – not only to save money and make their copying money go further, but also to allow 16 millimetre distribution of key films to film societies, schools and other borrowers from what is now the NFSA’s Non-Theatrical Loans Collection. It was a 16 millimetre black-and-white print that the Sydney Film Festival ran in 1955, and it was mostly in 16 millimetre black-and-white form that several generations of new audiences saw The Sentimental Bloke for another fifty years. In the meantime, all but one reel of the 35 mm print of Bloke that had survived the Cinema Branch fire, disappeared. It’s possible, as Ray Edmondson writes in the monograph accompanying today’s DVD, that these reels were unthinkingly sent to a Canberra tip as part of a nitrate vault clean-out in 1968.

The Sentimental Bloke was one of around 30 narrative films that Raymond Longford directed, most of them feature-length, or running an hour or more. Today it’s one of only a few survivors of Longford’s output. But what a film The Bloke was, and is. It was a radical departure for Longford and Lyell, most of whose preceding films had been quality melodramas showing the influence of the stage. With Bloke , Longford and Lottie Lyell made a naturalistic comedy that succeeded so well – and continues to work today – because it distilled the day-to-day lives, routines and outlooks of the type of people they’d mixed with most of their lives. Longford had grown up in the Darlinghurst and Woolloomooloo suburbs that are part of the character of Bloke , and in filming, he moved the story’s locale away from the Melbourne that was the setting of the CJ Dennis narrative poem from which the film was adapted.

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Longford was the most assured and successful Australian silent-era filmmaker. He was also the one most concerned with evolving and developing a distinctive Australian screen character. The Sentimental Bloke as a film was a huge hit with Australian audiences, and during hearings for a Royal Commission into the Australian Film Industry in 1927 was invariably recognised as the supreme achievement of Australian filmmaking’s silent era.

I’ve mentioned Lottie Lyell here and there. Now who was she, and what was her contribution to Longford’s films, and his life? For a start, she appeared in 25 of Longford’s films, 18 of them in starring roles. Increasingly, and certainly by the mid- 1910s, she was Longford’s co-producer, co-writer or sole writer, his film editor, his production designer, and, mostly uncredited, his co-director or at least co-directorial consultant. She received her only on-screen credit as Longford’s co-director on The Blue Mountains Mystery in 1921, and yet there are accounts, both in newspaper and magazine articles of the day and later oral histories, that she had a definite say in how the Longford- Lyell films were directed.

A key clue to Lyell’s and Longford’s approach to filmmaking comes from the fact that Lyell’s theatrical training had included an emphasis on what was referred to as ‘the natural method’, and there’s realism and believability aplenty in The Bloke . In 1920, Longford told a journalist: ‘The true art of acting is not to act. … That’s what I have drummed into the ears of my characters, and I think it has had its effect in the naturalness of my pictures. It is the little things that count, the little human touches that build up a big production, and to these I have given the most thought.’

In time, Lyell and Longford became partners in life as well as in their filmmaking. But her death in 1925 was something from which Longford never completely recovered. Though Longford and Lyell never married, Longford’s second wife Emilie saw to it that Longford was buried in the same grave plot as Lyell after his death in 1959. When asked by journalist Peter Hastings in 1955 why he hadn’t seen The Sentimental Bloke for three decades, Longford replied that the people associated with the Bloke had loved Lyell so 5 much, ‘that for years after she died, we didn’t want to see the film. It would have brought back too many memories.’

Another reason that Longford gave for not seeing the film for three decades was that it simply hadn’t been shown. Since the 1950s, The Sentimental Bloke has attracted far more audiences thanks to film festivals and film societies running 16 millimetre and other formats, than it ever found during Longford’s lifetime. And now we’re about to bring The Sentimental Bloke to an even broader audience thanks to the DVD we’re launching.

So what has been the background to this DVD?

In 1973, the Australian film archivist Ray Edmondson, was visiting George Eastman House, Rochester, New York State, which he had heard had a nitrate copy of The Sentimental Bloke . When Edmondson inquired, Eastman House told him they certainly had a copy of a film whose can labels read The Sentimental Blonde . When Edmondson unspooled the start of the first reel and found a credit for Raymond Longford, he knew he had found the 35 mm nitrate negative for The Sentimental Bloke .

But it took until the late 1990s for a copy of this rediscovered negative to reach Australia. It was through the involvement of Paolo Cherchi Usai, then Senior Curator of Film at George Eastman House, that the NFSA was finally able to obtain a finegrain copy of the original Bloke negative. This version, created for US release in the early 1920s, was shorter than the what we’ll call the Cinema Branch version that circulated for four decades from the ‘50s to the ‘90s. As well as new intertitles tailored for US audiences, the Eastman House version contained additional scenes that had not survived in the Cinema Branch copy reduced to 16 millimetre. In late 1999, Ray Edmondson sought sponsorship for the original film’s complete restoration onto 35mm. Sponsors who contributed were Kodak, who provided film stock for the restoration phases and up to four prints of the finished result, while Atlab donated printing and processing services for making duplicate negs and prints, along with Dominic Case’s expertise in supervising the Atlab part of the work that included re-creation of colour tints and tones. Working with 6

Dominic were experts on the film including Tony Buckley, who had kept a set of tinted frames from the Cinema Branch version of the film that he re-spliced at Automatic Film labs in the early 1950s.

At Atlab, a new master negative was assembled from the film’s two sources – the shorter, tighter Eastman House release version from 35mm, and the longer, closer-to original Cinema Branch release version that had survived at NFSA mostly on 16 millimetre. I say ‘mostly’ since one reel of the Cinema Branch 35 mm version had survived, and was able to be used in the restoration.

Between the year 2000 and 2004, there were some crucial steps to be taken, and via what would become two reconstruction stages. The first, completed in 2003, resulted in two tinted and toned mute 35mm prints on colour stock and stretch-printed from its original 16 frames per second to 24 frames per second to make the film projectable at today’s projection speed. The second stage, supervised by then NFSA Sydney Office manager David Noakes, was to ensure the correct timing of intertitles and fine-tuning of the colour ingredients, to incorporate restoration head and tail credits including sponsorship credits, to ensure consistent quality in the printing of intertitles, and – just as important – to ensure that this be the most complete version available. Guaranteeing the completeness involved a comparison of the Cinema Branch and George Eastman House versions, adding or extending shots into the restoration from both earlier versions where necessary, and making sure that their placement in the film was correct. The first print of the final version refined by David Noakes and team was finished on 11 June 2004, a mere four days before its premiere at the Sydney Film Festival, where it was voted that year’s audience favourite.

Contributing much to the restoration’s impact was its accompanying music by Jen Anderson and the Larrikins, who renewed an association with the film that had begun with a screening at the Melbourne Film Festival in 1995. Taking her first look at the 2004 restoration, Jen realised that she would have to score music for the 15 additional minutes 7 that the 2004 restoration brought to the screen, but this also gave her the opportunity to finesse, even re-write music she had written for the film in 1995.

Work on the Sentimental Bloke box set began in 2007 when NFSA’s Josie Tomas commissioned Tony Buckley to contribute his memories and knowledge of Bloke , Raymond Longford, and Longford and Lyell’s career for the set’s monograph. Under the supervision and intense editorial input of Jeannette Delamoir in 2008, Tony’s contribution was joined by chapters from Dominic Case, Ray Edmondson and Andrew Pike, along with a Longford filmography, four versions of the film’s intertitles, documents from NSW State Archives, a Longford memoir, and reproductions of newspaper and magazine articles on Longford, Lyell and the Bloke between 1918 and 1955.

The list of names of those who have brought the film to where it has reached today could be a long one. But in addition to those already mentioned in this talk, they should certainly include Ann Baylis, Ken Berryman, Steve Clark, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Ross Cooper, Tim Cowling, Marilyn Dooley, Viktor Fumic, Paul Healy, Julie Heffernan, Sally Jackson, Meg Labrum, Wanda Lazar, Jo Rose, Christine Standen, David Stiven, Josie Tomas, Jean Waghorn, and Eve Withers. I also need to specially thank the partners who worked the NFSA in making the restoration possible, Atlab, Kodak Australasia, George Eastman House, and those involved in the DVD release, ATOM and Madman.

So I’ll end by thinking back once again to Raymond Longford and his time on the wharves. Longford had been a seafarer early in life, and his connection with ships and their crews in the 1950s brought him full circle back to his career origins. And yes, Longford did see The Sentimental Bloke again, two years before he died. On 23 March 1958, he wrote to the National Library of Australia’s Chief Librarian, Harold White: ‘Some 12 months ago I reluctantly took myself along to witness, after 40 years, a screening of The Sentimental Bloke . There, silently, they all came to life’ – the ‘they’ including his long-departed actors Lottie Lyell, Arthur Tauchert as the Bloke, and Gilbert Emery as . 8

With today’s launch of The Sentimental Bloke , we’re giving the film a new life that a solitary nightwatchman, who hadn’t wanted to watch the film for so many years, could hardly have imagined. I get something new out of the film every time I see it. And I’m sure that so will generations around the world into the far distant future – a sure sign of the enduring classic that Bloke certainly is.

- Graham Shirley, 12 May 2009